Reading the 20th Century discussion

This is the place to alert other members about any great new books/authors you have found, those pre-orders you can't wait for, or books you have requested to be first in line for at the library.

Isn't it odd how so often you come across one book that is soon to be published, which you would like to read, only to find something similar? Two books I would love to read, both about girls schools:

Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979

When I asked a group of girls who had been at Hatherop Castle in the 1960s whether the school had had a lab in those days they gave me a blank look. 'A laboratory?' I expanded, hoping to jog their memories. 'Oh that kind of lab!' one of them said. 'I thought you meant a Labrador.'

'The cruel teachers. The pashes on other girls. The gossip. The giggles. The awful food. The homesickness. The friendships made for life. The shivering cold. Games of lacrosse, and cricket.

'The girls' boarding school! What a ripe theme for the most observant verbal artist in our midst today - the absurdly undersung Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who has the beadiness and nosiness of the best investigative reporter, the wit of Jane Austen and a take on life which is like no one else's. This book has been my constant companion ever since it appeared'
A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard

and

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl

23 February
Results rolling in! Algebra, 6th = 74%. Not bad. Latin = 55% Thrilled! History top = 85% smashing! Geography, disgusting, 2nd = 67%.

In 1954 in Carlisle lived an ordinary 15-year-old schoolgirl called Margaret. She would go on to become an acclaimed writer, the author of the novels Georgy Girl and Diary of an Ordinary Woman as well as biographies and memoirs. But this is her diary from that year; her life. Hers might be a lost world, but her daily observations bring it back in vivid, irresistible detail.

7 May
Wonderful feat accomplished yesterday by Roger Bannister! At last, the 4 minute mile. Glad an Englishman got it before anyone else.

24 July
Bought a pair of shorts – white, very short with two pockets. Super but rather daring!

2 September
Mum’s coming back on Saturday. Miss her every minute! I'll never marry and have a family -- housekeeping for two for a week is bad enough -- but for life!

Great idea for a thread, Susan - our TBRs and wish lists will be getting longer than ever. :)

I like the sound of both these books - I was at a girls' boarding school (actually a day school with some boarders in a separate boarding house) and am always interested in reading about the history of these schools. I also like Margaret Forster.

I’ve listened to a few Mike Duncan podcasts about the history of Rome and saw that he had recently released a book.

Mike Duncan
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

I think that would be an interesting read.

Looks interesting: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

The podcast looks good too: http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

Susan wrote: "When I asked a group of girls who had been at Hatherop Castle in the 1960s whether the school had had a lab in those days they gave me a blank look. 'A laboratory?' I expanded, hoping to jog their memories. 'Oh that kind of lab!' one of them said. 'I thought you meant a Labrador.'..."

That made me laugh! I didn't go to boarding school, but I did live in the grounds of one as my father was school chaplain - and the school had a black lab....of the dog variety!

Enemies Within: Communists, Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

Out 25th Jan, 2018

What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands?
With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents,this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies.

‘Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals’ motives and ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas’ writes Richard Davenport-Hines in his history of the men who were persuaded by the Soviet Union to betray their country.

In a book which attempts to counter many contradictory accounts, Enemies Within offers a study of character: both individual and institutional – the operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre.

The book refuses to present the Cambridge spies as they wished to be seen, in Marxist terms. It argues that these five men did their greatest harm to Britain not from their clandestine espionage but in their propaganda victories enjoyed from Moscow after 1951. Notions of trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust from the late nineteenth century to perestroika pepper its narrative.

In a book that is as intellectually thrilling as it is entertaining and illuminating, Davenport-Hines charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, and the suspicion of educational advantages began with the Cambridge Five and has transformed the social and political temper of Britain.

The author, Richard Davenport-Hines, wrote Titanic Lives, among other books, which I enjoyed - so I am looking forward to this one.

Bohemian London

Published today.

London has always been home to outsiders. To people who won't, or can't, abide by the conventions of respectable society. For close to two centuries these misfit individualists have had a name. They have been called Bohemians.

This book is an entertaining, anecdotal history of Bohemian London. A guide to its more colourful inhabitants. Rossetti and Swinburne, defying the morality of high Victorian England. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in the decadent 1890s. The Bloomsburyites and the Bright Young Things. Dylan Thomas, boozing in the Blitz, and Francis Bacon and his cronies, wasting time and getting wasted in 1950s Soho.

It's also a guide to the places where Bohemia has flourished. The legendary Cafe Royal, a home from home to artists and writers for nearly a century. The Cave of the Golden Calf, a First World War nightclub run by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg's widow. The Colony Room, the infamous drinking den presided over by the gloriously foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher, and the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street where the artistic avant-garde mixed with upper-crust eccentrics. The pubs of Fitzrovia where the painters Augustus John and Nina Hamnett rubbed shoulders with the occultist Aleister Crowley and the short-story writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, wearing mirror sunglasses and clutching a silver-topped Malacca cane, held court for his acolytes and admirers.

The story of Bohemian London is one of drink and drugs, sex and death, excess and indulgence. It's also a story of achievement and success. Some of the finest art and literature of the last two centuries has emerged from Bohemia. Nick Rennison's book provides a lively and enjoyable portrait of the world in which Bohemian Londoners once lived.

Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

Out 8th Feb, 2018

Between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War, while the patriarchs of the Liberal and Tory parties vied for supremacy in parliament, the campaign for women's suffrage was fought with great flair and imagination in the public arena.

Led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the suffragettes and their actions would come to define protest movements for generations to come. From their marches on Parliament and 10 Downing Street, to the selling of their paper, Votes for Women, through to the more militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union, whose slogan 'Deeds Not Words!' resided over bombed pillar-boxes, acts of arson and the slashing of great works of art, the women who participated in the movement endured police brutality, assault, imprisonment and force-feeding, all in the relentless pursuit of one goal: the right to vote.

A hundred years on, Diane Atkinson celebrates the lives of the women who answered the call to 'Rise Up'; a richly diverse group that spanned the divides of class and country, women of all ages who were determined to fight for what had been so long denied. Actresses to mill-workers, teachers to doctors, seamstresses to scientists, clerks, boot-makers and sweated workers, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English; a wealth of women's lives are brought together for the first time, in this meticulously researched, vividly rendered and truly defining biography of a movement.

Susan wrote: "Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

Out 8th Feb, 2016

Between the death of Queen..."

Do you have a typo - it is out in US in April 2018.

Oh, yes, sorry. 2018, I'll amend, thanks Jan.

Came across this, which is a definite pre-order:

Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51

Who were the Lost Girls? At least a dozen or so young women at large in Blitz-era London have a claim to this title. But Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.

Lys, Sonia, Barbara and Janetta had very different - and sometimes explosive personalities - but taken together they form a distinctive part of the war-time demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them determined to make the most of their lives in a highly uncertain environment. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand seen on the pavement in the Bloomsbury square, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letter-box, the hasty farewell to another half who might not ever come back, a world of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of war-time cultural life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown.

The Lost Girls were the product of a highly artificial environment. After it came to an end - on Horizon's closure in 1950 - their careers wound on. Later they would have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford. The last of them - Janetta - died as recently as three months ago. However tiny their number, they are a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.

Susan wrote: "Came across this, which is a definite pre-order:

Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51

Who were the Lost..."

It doesn't come out here until January.

Sounds great Susan - however I am not a fan of the cover

Quite retro, I thought?

It is out here in September, Jan.

I'd rather see actual photos of the women - plus that handwritten type to me signals something more trivial than the way the book is described. Still, a great idea for a book. I look forward to seeing how readers react.

The blonde woman at the front is Sonia Brownell but I think I have only seen it as a black and white photo before.

I like the cover. What was it - a photo taken in the offices at Horizon?

I liked the cover, but I take Nigeyb's point about photographs. They are rather glamorised.

It looks as if it may be a colourised or photo-shopped version of a black and white photograph. It is not a cover which would make me grab it from the library's new releases display; I agree with Nigey that it looks trivial. Let's hope the treatment of the subject isn't.
I am thinking of a book we read with the BYT forerunner of this group about two amazing women who were the first British nurses at the Western Front in WWI. The book spent more time describing them taking tea or drinks with junior officers than nursing.

There was an interesting review in the Guardian of Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, a short anti-Nazi book from the 1930s which is described as a "forgotten classic". This is being reprinted in paperback in the UK on September 5, but there are also other editions including one on Kindle Unlimited.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

It's on kindle unlimited, Judy. Thanks for posting.